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Welcome to Dedicated with Doug Brunt.

You have just gained access to an exclusive insider's look at the lives and works of some of your favorite authors and hear conversations with the world's greatest writers as they discuss their writing lifestyle, creative process, latest work, and behind the scenes revelations.

Welcome to Dedicated. I'm your host doug brunt and this is a special episode of dedicated it's december so it's that time of year

for gift giving and eggnog so i'm going to do an episode here in two parts the first part of the

show i'm going to make four book recommendations.

These can be gifts to loved ones or gifts to yourselves, and I promise they are all excellent, excellent books.

Then for the second part, courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio, I'm going to play free to you on this show, the prologue of the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel.

This story is the greatest caper of the 20th century.

And that's not just me talking. That's reviews. And it will reset your understanding of the century.

So please take a listen to that and enjoy. But first, the book picks. I've made one ground rule for myself with this. Because I love all the authors who've come on this show and the authors who will come on the show in the future. As you know, nobody comes on this show whose work

I don't enjoy and respect. So I don't want to pick favorites. So the books I pick here were each written

by authors who are at present dead. So this also has the advantage, of course, that each of these books has

stood the test of time. So for my first pick, the Zimmerman Telegram, this is a nonfiction book

by the incredible Barbara Tuckman. She was the two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She passed

away in 1989 at the age of 77. and the Zimmerman Telegram was published in

1958. It tells the amazing story of a plot between Germany and Mexico that contributed to

America joining World War I, even more so than the sinking of the Lusitania. The telegram

in question here, the Zimmerman Telegram, occurred in January of

...